November 26, 2013

Peace Through Weakness

WASHINGTON — The weekend ended with the first tangible sign of a nuclear deal with Iran, after more than three decades of hostility. Then on Monday came the announcement that a conference will convene in January to try to broker an end to the civil war in Syria.

The success of either negotiation, both long sought by President Obama, is hardly assured — in fact the odds may be against them. But the two nearly simultaneous developments were vivid statements that diplomacy, the venerable but often-unsatisfying art of compromise, has once again become the centerpiece of American foreign policy.

What is missing is the sense of an actual strategy beyond 'give talk a chance'. For example, Syria is being propped up by Iran, so the linkage of those two announcements is not a shock. However...

But some of the crucial dealings have occurred in the shadows. In March, administration officials said, Mr. Obama authorized a small team of senior officials from the White House and the State Department to travel secretly to Oman, the Arab sultanate, where they met face to face with Iranian officials to explore the possibility of a nuclear deal.

The cloak-and-dagger was necessary, the officials said, because it allowed the United States and Iran to discuss the outlines of a nuclear deal without fear that details would leak out. Cutting out others eliminated the competing agendas that come with the six negotiating partners engaged in the formal Geneva talks.

So we have been having secret talks with Iran since March. But what about the US 'red line' dealings with Syria during that time frame? It might have been obvious to a blind man that bombing Iran's client while negotiating with Iran was not likely to boost Iranian moderates or marginalize Iranian hard-liners. Yet Obama persisted in blustering, ultimately without conviction, about attacking Syria. Why - to demonstrate to the Iranians that our threats were hollow and the Russians were the real players in the Middle East?

Baffling.

FREQUENTLY UNASKED QUESTIONS: How does a US-Iranian detente impact the two former powers with interests in the outome? I refer of course to Turkey and Hillary.

Officials said the United States military would continue to assert its right to fly through what it regards as international airspace after a recent Chinese claim to an “air defense identification zone.”

Woke up at 6 to snow. Immediately panicked, woke up my niece and got her on the road by 7. Arrived in Philly a while ago. I swear I need to get out more, I'm like a 90 year old woman who drives 80. Oh and other then a little rain, the weather is fine.

As a conservative I'm tickled to see that the NYT is consistent after all these years-- they loved the Munich Accords as well. Brit Conservatives who condemned Munich appeasement as feckless and a disaster were called warmongrs by the NYT. When Chamberlain returned from Munich, one such conservative MP made this observation in the House of Commons about tossing the Czechs overboard:

"You had the choice between dishonor and war. You chose dishonor... and now you shall have war."

We will have the Mullahs' war at the time of their choosing. Many innocents will die.

It’s a “massive downgrade of U.S.-Vatican ties,” said former U.S. Ambassador James Nicholson in the National Catholic Reporter. “It’s turning this embassy into a stepchild of the embassy to Italy. The Holy See is a pivot point for international affairs and a major listening post for the United States, and … [it’s] an insult to American Catholics and to the Vatican.”

Because of a shortage of active-duty priests, contractors work at about 50 bases worldwide, he said.

Leonard was just a few days into the assignment when the shutdown kicked in. A sign on the chapel door informed him all Catholic services, including religious education, would be indefinitely suspended.

He offered to work without pay, but the Navy refused.

"I was incredulous," Leonard said. "It was a slap in the face to all our Catholic service men and women. This is a very important part of their lives."

He contacted the Archdiocese for the Military, which put him in contact with the Thomas More Law Center.

Within days, Leonard had become the face of the resistance. Through the lawsuit, he hopes to have contract priests recognized as essential personnel or force the military to allow clergy members to volunteer during shutdowns.

The Hill will have MSM in her corner no matter what happens. If in 2016 404's foreign policy cannot be spun as anything other than a failure, the MSM meme will be the steady hand of The Hill will be needed. If MSM can spin 404's foreign policy as somewhat effective, the spin will be that The Hill laid the groundwork.

Race-by-race polling conducted over the last month has painted a grim picture of the difficult environment Senate Democrats are facing next year. In Louisiana, a new state survey showed Landrieu's approval rating is now underwater; she tallied only 41 percent of the vote against her GOP opposition. In Arkansas, where advertising on the health care law began early, Sen. Mark Pryor's approval sank to 33 percent, a drop of 18 points since last year. A new Quinnipiac survey showed Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, who looked like a lock for reelection last month, in a dead heat against little-known GOP opponents. Even a Democratic automated poll from Public Policy Polling showed Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina running neck-and-neck against Republican opposition, with her job disapproval spiking over the last two months. These are the types of numbers that wave elections are made of.

There has to be a slight shift from "The President is an incompetent liar." to "All Democrats are incompetent liars." in order to generate a wave greater than '10. It's very possible but it requires a slight shift away from BOzo and a heavier focus on his legislative enablers.

I believe the '14 state legislative races are likely to be the biggest election story and I wouldn't be surprised to see GOP majority control in 32 states. I also will not be surprised to see GOP Senate pickups in Michigan and Oregon.

No one seems as certain that they know what the Republicans need to do to win presidential elections as those Republicans who have lost presidential elections, such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole. Moreover, people take them seriously, and seem not to notice that what the losers advocate is the opposite of what won Ronald Reagan two landslide election victories.

Those who want to “spread the wealth” almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?

Writing about the Habsburg Empire, distinguished British historian Paul Johnson said, “Every reform created more problems than it solved.” That was not peculiar to the Habsburg Empire. The same could be said of modern welfare states, and especially our own ObamaCare.

Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.

One of the reasons it has taken so long for some people to finally see through Barack Obama is that people do not like to admit, even to themselves, that they have been played for fools by a slick-talking politician.

I believe the '14 state legislative races are likely to be the biggest election story and I wouldn't be surprised to see GOP majority control in 32 states. I also will not be surprised to see GOP Senate pickups in Michigan and Oregon.

Hope so, Rick. The state leges will be crucial battlefields going forward.

Obama is anti-Catholic . That is why we have the current "war on Christmas. It is why he will not utter the words "under God." He thinks he is a god and above reproach.
HB. To Soylent! Happy Thanksgiving to all!
Closing the Vatcan Embassy does not surprise me.Clarice is right. Obama is on a tear because his Health Plan is going belly-up along with many prog dreams. Alinsky rules are exploding in his face and people don't much like him anymore.

"It's armored. It's heavy. It's intimidating. And it's free," said Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, among five county sheriff's departments and three other police agencies in New York that have taken delivery of an MRAP.

Because that's exactly the goal of local civillian police forces drawn from the very communities they serve - intimidation.

And aside from everything else that's awful about this program, the idea that it's "free" is rank stupidity.

The refitting of the vehicles for police use alone (the article quotes it at $70,000) would pay the salary for an officer for a year. There's also training to properly use the vehicle (I imagine that driving one safely isn't quite the same as getting behind the wheel of a plain old patrol car), ongoing maintenance (can't be cheap) and fuel (gas prices at 5 MPG add up fast).

--Inequality breeds desperation; concentrated power breeds arrogance. Both lead to the same result.--

Absurd.
The former leads to incentives, the latter leads to tyranny.
Inequality of wealth in a free market breeds upward mobility and a desire and an ability to be upwardly mobile.
Unfortunately, there always exist everywhere demagogues who seek to limit or prevent upward mobility through government dependence and, not coincidentally, also seek to concentrate power.
In our country they are known as Democrats...or worse.

From what I understand, last night after 9:19 no one could access the website and received a "hash reference" message. If so, that portends a code problem, most likely Java Script Perl error and a data base array issue. Most likely at the typepad server location.

Or the typepad engineers could have been doing on-line active software maintenance due to all the complaints.

Obama is no longer the future. He can't be. Not on his second term. The smart money is no longer on books explaining why he succeeds, but books explaining what went wrong. The old genius has to make way for the next genius who will make the same exact mistakes, but offer a little more variety.

The game could have gone on a little longer, if only Obama hadn't made the mistake of actually assuming that he could deliver, if he hadn't been so taken by the applause of the crowd and the outcome of the rigged matches, that he actually tried to wrestle one of the slabs of muscle for real.

Modern genius is an intangible thing. It isn't the brilliant poem or the moving sonata. It's the idea of genius. The distilled abstraction of change. The shiny flash of the magician's powder. A change in appearance that startles and excites. Vague promises of an amazing future soon to come. That is true of our politics and our dot com economics.

The future arrived some time ago. We are living now in the post-future of the present where everything is momentarily amazing, but nothing endures, where last week's blockbuster is already forgotten and last year's genius is sheepishly fondling his framed magazine covers and the hit songs never go away, until they're gone, and then they're gone for good.

Obama is an empty construct of what the future was supposed to be; young charismatic, post-racial, post-partisan and solution-oriented. Now he's already becoming old and outdated, a future that was, a future that might have been, a poster on an aging Occupier's wall, a fading magazine cover, another progressive dead end for a movement always dreaming of a tomorrow that never comes.

"Obama is an empty construct of what the future was supposed to be; young charismatic, post-racial, post-partisan and solution-oriented. Now he's already becoming old and outdated, a future that was, a future that might have been, a poster on an aging Occupier's wall, a fading magazine cover, another progressive dead end for a movement always dreaming of a tomorrow that never comes."

"In his first encyclical released on Tuesday, Pope Francis laid out a broad mission statement which restated the church's opposition to abortion but also emphasized what it can do for the poor and oppressed trapped in a world of growing income inequality.

"It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new," the pontiff wrote in the 85-page document. "Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the 'exploited' but the outcast, the 'leftovers'.

The pope also denounced "trickle-down" theories of economics promoted by many conservatives and politicians who espouse an unregulated free market.

"In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world," he said. "This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting."

Reagan, Thatcher and Pope JPII, the USA and two strong allies working together bring down the menace of the latter part of the 20th Century, the Soviet Union, and this BASTARD, who cannot even say "under God" as part of the Gettysburg Address, decides to close the Embassy with the Vatican.

Are you kidding me? Really?

MarkO has it right:

Apparently, the future belongs to those who slander the Pope of Christianity.

You'd have to be crazy to think Obama had Muslim ties. Crazy. Bat shit crazy.

“What has been released by the website of the White House as a fact sheet is a one-sided interpretation of the agreed text in Geneva and some of the explanations and words in the sheet contradict the text of the Joint Plan of Action (the title of the Iran-powers deal), and this fact sheet has unfortunately been translated and released in the name of the Geneva agreement by certain media, which is not true,” Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Marziyeh Afkham said on Tuesday.

"Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) left the door open to another presidential run during a Monday panel in New Hampshire. Asked whether he ever thinks about running again — Huntsman dropped out of the 2012 Republican primary after finishing third in New Hampshire — he suggested he hadn´t ruled out the option. He closed a long response to the question, posed at Saint Anselm College, by saying: 'Which is a long way of saying that I love public service.'"

Francis' paradigm is shaped by Peron's statist social democratic model. He is also deeply influenced by Luke 14:25-33, the giving up all of your possessions passage, as well as the Church's preferential option for the poor. Camels and eyes of needles also come to mind.

He is speaking against the oligarchs and the crony capitalists and the corporate leaders who pursue profit at all cost.

Interesting isn't it how politicians on the Right continually have their college transcripts leaked to the Press.

Yesterdays Sydney Morning Herald posts the Oxford transcripts of Aussie Prime Minister Tony Abbott, with just enough negative editorial comments to make sure that the average reader is supposed to come away with the impression that the new PM as a bit of a dummy: Tony Abbott's Oxford transcript released

---Tony Abbott was not the best student at Oxford University...

---The young Mr Abbott's academic transcript, obtained by journalist James West, reveals a student somewhere in the ruck...

---Mr Abbott did most poorly in...

---The future prime minister completed the course and was placed in the "second class"...

But then we get this:

Mr Abbott's contemporary, the Conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron, emerged with a first-class degree. But former US president Bill Clinton, one of the most intellectually gifted leaders the modern world has seen, who also received a Rhodes scholarship, did not complete the course.

So Clinton is a genius who couldn't complete the course, but Abbott who did, was a bit of a dunce. At least that's the take away I get from reading the story. Down here in Oz BTW Abbott is getting hammered continually by the re-unified Left, on all Media channels, for not funding the nations School system to the degree the Left wants.

Anyone know if Bill Clinton's Oxford Transcript was ever released to the Public?

Was Logan sandbagged by someone regarding the story? I find it odd that the media is now reporting on reporters screw ups, working overtime to make it a fake scandal. However, the administration needs an example made of someone and I suppose she'll do.

So, the one person who quasi-loses her job over Benghazi isn't any of the incompetents and fools who let our men be slaughtered and ignored their pleas for more security for months, nor is it the liars who told us the attack was the result of a video when they knew it was a planned terrorist attack as soon as it happened; it's a reporter.

The administration is considering it and may have taken steps to do so in Europe. So now North Korea and Iran can play bad cop worse cop...this is going to be a f'nin disaster over the next couple of years.

daddy-

no word on the transcript. with the media reprtoing it...why shouldn't we trust them he's a genius.

NK-safe trip. Don't forget to report in on Americans look for a place to have turkey on Thursday.

We were in Venice right after the 2002 election and I was looking for a paper to describe all the details and other Americans doing the same turned into a political discussion with people from all over the US sharing what tidbits they had heard as we all stood around right off St Marks Square.

It is my fondest hope that we will emerge from all the current disasters with a fair greater appreciation for what made this unique country so unprecedentedly great.

The seizures of Catholic Church assets across Europe amounts to the largest appropriation of property in history.

What is left is small parcels of real estate, much of it in use just like Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Jewish, or Muslim places of worship under the same laws in the countries where they are located.

2,000 years of history and the heartfelt desire to glorify God tends to build up some assets. Most of these are in the form of religious objects and art, which are priceless.

The Church today is not the all powerful, wealthy institution it was by any stretch.

Damn right, Lyle. The first thing she'd be met with by a Republican party with a killer instinct are TV ads cataloging her numerous lies, named as such.

Personally, I'd follow up with her hysterical shrieking about dissenting and Benghazi, and her many dishonest statements disowning her AUMF vote, quoting her on the danger of Iraq WMDs dating back to the Clinton administration.

She can be Alinskied, but the gloves would have to come off the white toga crowd. I don't believe they have it in them.

The White House confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon on Monday that the final details of the plan have yet to be worked out, meaning that Iran is not yet beholden to a six month freeze its nuclear activities.

“I'm sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and disagree with this administration, somehow you're not patriotic. We need to stand up and say we're Americans, and we have the right to debate and disagree with any administration!”

The president will show solidarity with his base this Thanksgiving by having the tax payers pay for his family's Thanksgiving dinner . Friday and Saturday he will not watch football and help with writing code for the Obamacare website .

So this was the instance that prompted the no hash reference, if one looks at this panjamdrum like the 'THe Princess Bride' or Spinal Tap, with them insisting it's inconceivable, and she among others in the chorus, saying 'those words you are using'

Well Welsh, has been occasionally on point, like when he pointed out the Saudi lobbies self interested opposition to the Iraq War, that was more then a decade ago, and other instances when he attacked the Huntress, that was a few years ago